Interesting discussion. I'll raise a few issues.
Le 15/10/2013 13:29, Esteban Lorenzano a écrit :
well... fonts and UX in general are two different (yet related) issues.
UX is a huge an complicated task, and has to be taken very seriously if we want
to succeed. To allow the appropriate/productive/happy flows in an environment
requires a lot of effort and to put all the pieces together.
Yes, I know, that sounds so general that is like not saying anything :)
Here is the concrete: Put all the UX pieces together requires a lot of effort
usually not taken into account. That's how the UX evolved more or less the same
way as morphic: a patch over a patch without much thinking about the issue,
just takign what is there and parching/extending as needed. As morphic, the
current UX in pharo is broken: there is no coherence between tools and
sometimes even inside the same tool (for example nautilus has different
behavior inside the code panel than in the list panels on top).
This is not the fault of any tool, just a consequence of how evolution was
managed until now.
Some of the thing most forgot is that when you do a GUI, what takes time is not
doing it, it's polishing it. Making sure all small things play together nicely,
and that you've spent days trying to get that drag and drop to work in the
perfect way, with the right feedback and all (and focus navigation, and...).
So, we wanted a better UX for Pharo3 that included: a new Theme, new Icon set,
and new tools that worked well together. But task demonstrated to be a hard to
beat beast, and we just moved forward in small areas (there is for example a
new centralized menu coming along with a new spotlight).
And there is a prototype of a new theme and also some icons that where thought
specially and that will fit nicely. But they will not be ready this year and
after thinking a while (and getting feedback of people in community), we
decided, for Pharo3:
- adopt the glamour theme. This is a step forward our current one because
glamour guys (specially Doru) continued working on it to have a really clean
and simple theme.
Is it the default theme coming with the latest 3.0, with that flat look? Hate
it because it breaks one HCI guideline visual cue: feedback when pressing on a
GUI element (scrollbars, buttons); there is none in that theme.
There it looks like a step backward, coming back to the squeak look (which
turned me away from squeak for many years: yes that's not rational but can't
get over it. Pharo was the first to give me back the feedback at the GUI level)
- adopt the EclipsePack theme because is an iconset specially thought for
programming that plays very well together. No matter if you do not like Eclipse
(even if I think you are missing the relevance of Eclipse and a lot of good
ideas that we could take from them), is about creating a unified vision. The
old icon set (famfam) was not intended for programming environment and also
there were a lot of different icons incorporated anarchically.
Iconset are hard. But some of the Eclipse iconset are downright ugly (packages).
- adopt a monospaced font for coding (right now Source Code Pro) and a
non-monospaced for the rest (right now Open Sans).
Hum. Once you're set on a non-monospaced font for coding, as most smalltalkers
have, going back to a monospaced font will hurt... I'm not even using a
monospaced font for coding in C :(
The objective is to offer a L&F that where visual elements plays well together.
Work on that is the real key. Not sure the theme changes are part of it,
however.
I value more a drive to get everything Spec-iffied: tends to create a lot of
common look and feel because applications tend to behave in the same way.
And there is another more important (IMHO) objective: to offer newcomers an environment
easier to approach. Pharo (and all Smalltalk-inspired environments) is already very alien
for newcomers. We get a lot of power in exchange of that alienish stuff, but very often the
curve of learning or acceptance is too high and people that could step closer to us are
pushed away. So, my idea is to keep been as alien as possible in the things that make us
Pharo and be the less alien possible in the rest: A nice L&F that can be feel as
"some kind" familiar, is part of it.
It's a good objective, but... There is something there; Pharo is different
enough in it's approach that trying to match Eclipse won't work and may even
disrupt more, because you will make it alike where it is not.
Said so... well you still can switch back to the old and ugly (IMO) L&F
executing some lines of code in your workspace.
Or a setting somewhere :)
Same to fonts: monospaced fonts is the worldwide accepted way of present
source code. Why should we stay different?
I wouldn't be so sure of that.
In any case, please give it a chance before drop it (once I can actually see
why the fonts are not really applied) and we'll see how it works.
I will :) But, I'd be frank, here none of us is a HCI specialist, and it shows.
Sorry, but it does. No usability testing, no look into HCI guidelines, but, at
the same time, probably the most advanced GUI toolkit available (Morphic), some
of the best mind when it comes to architecturing GUI code (and code on
average), and the most productive environment around.
If you want to make it familiar, look into Dolphin and VisualWorks and copy
that :)
Thierry
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Thierry Goubier
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